Monday, August 22, 2011

Notable changes in Jenkins OS X installer 1.427

Okay, nearly every every week there is a new version of the installer available. With every Jenkins release you will also find a new installer for OS X. But that's nothing new. With release 1.427 it's time to tell a little bit about the recent changes in the installer. What else has been changed in the latest Jenkins release can be found here. The installer can be downloaded from here.

What's new in this release?

There were a lot of changes in the recent versions, but I'm going to mention them here too (since they have never been mentioned anywhere else)

Installation as launch daemon instead of launch agent. If you don't know the difference, here is a good explanation.

By default Jenkins will be installed as launch daemon, but the user can choose to not install it as launch daemon. In this case only the jenkins.war get's installed. Please start jenkins on your own.

There is a preference file available to easily tweak the Jenkins program arguments like JENKINS_HOME, prefix, httpPort, etc.

Documentation with instructions on how to change the arguments by modifying the preference file. The documentation will be installed and is available from /Library/Documentation/Jenkins or you can have sneak peak here.

When it comes to the installation process you will find something like this. More options than ever before. ;-)

What's next?

There is currently one big improvements "work in progress": the PrefPane! This will allow you to easily modify the Jenkins settings, start and stop Jenkins, open the logfile, etc.

There is no planned release date for it, but I think it will be available before Christmas 2011.

You have ideas for improvement?

Let us know. We are happy to resolve issues that could ease your life dealing with Jenkins on OS X. The easiest way is to create a new ticket here. If you want to contribute some code, you can even do this by forking the repo on github and start working on it.